A Black educator was hired to reform a school that held a mock slave auction. It was a racist nightmare, she says
Exclusive: Treda Collier Dickenman “is both resilient and extraordinary in her courageousness,” attorney Rebecca Brazzano told The Independent
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Your support makes all the difference.After a fifth-grade teacher at an elite private school in suburban New York conducted a mock slave auction — in which Black students were “sold” to their white classmates — as part of her social studies class, a state investigation determined the wildly misguided reenactment had had a “profoundly negative effect” on all of the children involved.
As a result, the Chapel School, a Lutheran institution that says its mission is to “know, live, and share the love of Christ,” fired the teacher involved and agreed to address issues of racial insensitivity within its walls, which included hiring a chief diversity officer to oversee the initiative.
“We accept responsibility for the overall findings [of the state investigation], and we are committed to implementing all items outlined by the attorney general to help us deepen our cultural competence,” Principal Michael Schultz said in a statement at the time.
But, according to a harrowing $3 million lawsuit obtained by The Independent, the Ivy League-educated Black woman selected for the job now says school administrators lied to the AG about diversifying the faculty, forced her to submit falsified documentation to James’s office, and subjected her to unchecked bigotry by faculty and pupils alike.
In one particularly troubling instance, Treda Collier Dickenman’s complaint says students doctored her official portrait in the Chapel School directory “by turning the photo into a grotesque racial caricature, depicting her as a so-called ghetto rapper adorned with stereotypical artifacts like a gold chain around her neck, gold teeth, and a cigarette hanging from her mouth.”
As for the administration, Collier Dickenman alleges in her complaint that she was set up to fail, while being used merely as “an unknowing decoy, a token representative to mislead the Attorney General, falsely signaling compliance while secretly maintaining the same exclusionary… practices they had always upheld.”
Broadly speaking, Collier Dickenman’s complaint, which was filed in Manhattan federal court on Friday and assigned to a US District Court judge and magistrate on Monday, contends the Chapel School’s conduct “was not just evasion, it was fraud.”
On Monday evening, Senior Pastor Robert Hartwell of the Chapel School, who is named as a defendant in Collier Dickenman’s suit, told The Independent, “We don’t provide comment on pending litigation... We care deeply for our community and when possible we would love to talk more about our programs and services that characterize our mission to congregation, children and community.”
Collier Dickenman’s attorney, Rebecca Brazzano, also declined to comment in detail, but told The Independent, “I can offer that Ms. Collier Dickenman is both resilient and extraordinary in her courageousness.”
Messages sent to AG James’s office went unanswered.
When Collier Dickenman applied in July 2019 for the newly created chief diversity officer position, she was “excited about this new potential new role,” her complaint states. It says she believed the Chapel School “understood the severity of what was at stake and were fully invested in the serious work ahead,” and that she was “eager to forge ahead to share her talent in what appeared to be a committed, community-focused, professional, self-reflective, responsive, motivated, and cooperative team.”
However, when Collier Dickenman began working at the Chapel School that November, the complaint says she started seeing red flags immediately.
Rather than accepting responsibility for making things right after the mock slave auction was exposed, school administrators blamed “everyone else” for having reported it to the Attorney General’s Office, the complaint states. It says Collier Dickenman was utilized as, simply, “a token Black marionette figure while ensuring real power remained in the hands of White male Lutheran leadership.”
“From the moment [Collier Dickenman] assumed the role of Chief Diversity Officer, [the school] launched a relentless campaign to diminish, isolate, and impede her,” according to the complaint.
She was not given an office or dedicated workstation, but rather, was “forced to carry her computer and necessary supplies from classroom to conference room like a transient visitor,” the complaint alleges. When she was finally “granted” a temporary office, Collier Dickenman was moved into what the complaint describes as a makeshift storage room… cluttered with fundraising boxes and discarded materials.”
The school “repeatedly excluded” Collier Dickenman from decision-making processes, “flatly rejected” her contributions, and “forbade her from making recommendations to the Attorney General’s office,” according to the complaint, which says she was instead forced to submit “falsified responses” to James’s office “as if they were her own.” Citing “unbearable pressure” by the school and its attorney, Collier Dickenman says she eventually refused to go along with the ruse, calling the attempts at altering her reports “both unethical and an abuse of power.”
A month after Collier Dickenman was hired, Schultz allegedly deceived the AG’s office in an update about having hired seven new teachers, five of whom he claimed were “minority faculty of color.” Yet, according to Collier Dickenman’s complaint, only two of the five were actually people of color.
The school also “blatantly disregarded” the AG’s requirement to commit new financial aid to diverse applicants, describing the mandate as “a legal obligation they openly resented.”
“Rather than honoring this decree, [school administrators] were insulted and outraged that the Attorney General dared to tell them how to allocate their funds,” the complaint states. “Instead of investing in balanced financial distribution, as they were required to do, [the school] redirected institutional funds to gratify their wealthy White parent base, ensuring that their resources were used to reinforce privilege, not fairness.”
When she presented ideas to parents about ways of teaching students about systemic racism in American society following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, Collier Dickenman was “met with a barrage of resistance,” according to the complaint, which says she was told to instead teach the kids that “all white police officers are not bad.”
And when Collier Dickenman tried to introduce a book to students about Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old Black girl who was the first child to integrate a previously segregated school in Louisiana, white parents “vehemently objected, insisting they did not want their children ‘exposed’ to such stories,” the complaint continues.
For its part, the school unfailingly sided with the parents, according to the complaint.
In March 2024, Collier Dickenman finally reached her breaking point, the complaint goes on. She submitted her resignation under protest, “explicitly citing the school’s inequitable systems, abusive power dynamics, devious resistance to cultural equity and rank discrimination against [her],” the complaint states.
“This was not a departure, it was an expulsion, carefully disguised by [the school] as resignation,” it contends, alleging Collier Dickenman has suffered mental anguish and emotional distress.
“Defendants were never serious about compliance, equity or cultural awareness for all students, or Cultural Growth,” according to the complaint, which calls the school out for what it terms a “brazen endeavor to obstruct and obscure any lawful scrutiny” by the attorney general.
Collier Dickenman is demanding economic, compensatory, and punitive damages of no less than $3 million, plus attorneys’ fees.